The American Council for Technology and the Industry Advisory Council's Executive Leadership Conference brings together government and industry leaders to address acquisition, security, and human capital challenges in an increasingly mobile world.

Federal mobility push means changes to culture, technology

Lee Holcomb, senior vice president, Lockheed Martin

The federal workforce is becoming more mobile than ever — and could soon
have the technology to match.

Already mobile applications are seen as a potential driver of workplace
collaboration and public engagement, and there may come a time when when brick-
and-mortar offices and desktop computing are the exceptions to the rule.

Lee Holcomb, a senior vice president at Lockheed Martin and this year's industry
chair of the Executive Leadership Conference, joined the Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Amy Morris to discuss the federal
mobility push — the theme of this year's conference, which kicks off this
weekend.

Holcomb said the rapid changes in mobile technology have forced the federal
workforce to evolve as well.

"We're at a very interesting time in information technology," he said, "where
mobility and mobile devices are becoming much more prevalent than fixed
workstations, where the workforce is no longer stationed in offices but is quite
mobile."

The conference will mostly focus on how industry supports the government's
transition from a fixed workplace to one which embraces mobility.

The issue is two-fold: Leveraging mobile technologies and practices to make
federal agencies work better, themselves, and deploying those tools to more easily
engage with the public through the use of mobile apps, for example.

The government has to continue to develop mobile apps and push them out to
citizens, he said.

"It's really changing the way the government interacts with citizens and how
citizens interact with the government," he added.

"Once you start down this path, there's just so many different avenues and
exciting opportunities to exploit the technology."

The technological mobile push has coincided with agency culture changes, such as
increased teleworking and downsizing workspaces.

"The robust environment that we have in our personal lives — the mobile apps
that we see on Androids and iPhones — don't quite exist in the federal work
environment yet," Holcomb said, but they likely will in the future.